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I called the Polk Country (Des Moines) Recorder's office yesterday, just to confirm that the marriage license is ready.  It is.  The call indicates a change in my personality over the last two years: I used to be completely blasé about this sort of thing, just assuming that everything would go as scheduled.  Now, with so little to do during the day, I have too much time to worry that something will go wrong.  The wedding bands also arrived.  They fit and look great--a white brushed gold center band with polished beveled edges.  The wedding party has increased to a grand total of four, as two friends from the area are driving up together for the ceremony and the dinner afterwards and then driving back that same evening.

I've wanted to blog about the George Zimmerman verdict, but there are so many things to say that I'm afraid I can't create a cohesive (or even coherent) essay.  Bête noire number one is Angela Corey, the Florida state attorney, a Tea Party sort, who had no interest in prosecuting Zimmerman and passed the task to her subordinates.  She had no such problem with Marissa Alexander, the African-American woman who fired a warning shot into the air to try to scare off her abusive husband.  No one was injured, and Alexander should never have been charged, but Corey was aggressive and prosecuted the case.  If it went to trial, under Florida's draconian minimum sentencing laws, the punishment would be a twenty-year sentence.  So Corey offered a plea deal: plead guilty to a lesser offense and get "only" three years in jail.  Confident that there was no viable case, Alexander refused the deal.  She was convicted after a jury deliberated for all of twelve minutes and sentenced to the full twenty years.  (Thirty years ago, about 20% of cases went to trial; now less than 5% do, mainly because the risk of what might happen given the severity of minimum sentencing laws and three strikes, you're out, as Alexander found out, is so frightening that, whether the accused is guilty or not, a plea bargain seems the safer alternative.)  After the trial, which the prosecutors of Zimmerman (i.e., what should have been Corey's side) had lost, Corey gave an almost celebratory press conference, now willing to be front and center.  She was dressed and made-up to the nines (the Katherine Harris of the 2010s) with a giant cross around her neck, reinforcing my prejudice that the larger and/or gaudier the cross someone wears, the less I trust him or her.

Then there were the peculiarities of the Florida judicial system, most notably having six-person juries in non-capital cases.  Seminole county, where the trial took place, is 80% white, so statistics might suggest that there would be a black juror, but there was none.  Studies have shown that the presence of even one black juror on a panel reduces convictions of black defendants by at least 10%.   With a twelve-person jury, there would have been a greater chance that the jury panel would have been more diverse.  Equally unsettling was Judge Nelson's decision at the beginning of the case that arguments from "racial profiling" could not be introduced.  I have no idea what her rationale was, since race was clearly at the heart of this case.  (Zimmerman's defense team refused to admit this during the trial, and then as soon as it was over and they were giving a press conference, Mark O'Mara introduced it with no qualms about the hypocrisy.) 

Zimmerman's defense team was high-powered because of 100s of 1000s of dollars that poured in from outside conservative sources.  My own choice for outrageous moment was when O'Mara brought in a huge chunk of cement, announced theatrically that he wasn't going to drop it on the floor, and then make great show of wiping his hands and suit, as if they'd been contaminated by what he contended was Trayvon Martin's lethal weapon.  No matter that the fatal shot took place on grass 25-30' feet from the sidewalk.  No matter that by the sidewalk-as-weapon argument, we're all in possession of deadly weapons any time we walk on a road or street. 

And then there was juror B-37, who could hardly wait to speak out and announce a book deal (since abandoned).  She said that she thought George Zimmerman's heart was in the right place.  Clearly, Trayvon Martin's was not, since it was at the wrong end of Zimmerman's gun.